No-Doze Poem

What happened to all the glass slippers?

All the little black girls at midnight turn to prison shivs.

People used to wear palm leaves,

unisex skirts with nothing in imagination, ditch dead.

There were slacks for wannabe machinists

that turned out to be women, frail seamstresses.

Everyone left their buttons undone

if they did real work, onions and old sun.

What’s that? Hawaiian noises and bongos?

They weren’t even joking with semis and No-Doze.

There was a chicken in every garage

and Bunco assaulted the communists, a three-dice barrage:

a recipe for grey plaster, chutes and ladders, insured disruption.